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Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Syria: Descending Into Civil War

By Walden Bello

The
sound of what seems like thunder wakes me up at 3 am, Monday, a few hours after
I arrived in Damascus. Storm coming, I think, and my jetlagged brain plunges
back to sleep.

When
I go down to jog at six, the side streets around the Hotel Arjaan are blocked
off by burly security men who tell me I can only run in the hotel grounds.I am not about to argue with guys with
Kalashnikovs, and I begin to sense that their presence has something to do with
what woke me up hours earlier. Only when the Philippine Embassy car picks me up
at 930 a.m. do I get the real story from our diplomatic staff. The sound of
thunder was the explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade that killed eight
alleged terrorists in a building just two blocks away from my hotel and about
three blocks from the Philippine embassy here in West Mezzeh, which is also
known as the diplomatic quarters.

The
gunfight between government forces and “Afghan nationals,” as the
government-controlled media described them, lasted six hours. Like the two
massive explosions on Sunday, a few hours before I arrived in the Syrian
capital, it was a grim announcement that the rebellion against the regime had
arrived in the capital in earnest. Those blasts destroyed two government
buildings that had been considered highly secure in the center of the capital,
killing 27 people and wounded about a hundred.

Homs: Shattered City

The
next day I travel to the city that has become emblematic of Syria’s version of
the Arab Spring: Homs. This city, an opposition stronghold, was subjected to a
26-day siege by the Syrian Army in February. The estimates of how many people
perished vary, with the city’s chief of police admitting to some 3,000 dead and
the western press reporting twice or more that number.

I
am here in my role as head of the Philippine House of Representatives Committee
on Overseas Workers’ Affairs. My trip to Homs is part of a mission to locate
Filipino overseas workers in Syria—mainly domestic workers—who are still in the
country or have been killed in the fighting. The plan is to repatriate them or
their remains to the Philippines. Filipino workers are among the millions of
overseas workers who have been or are likely to be caught in the crossfire of
the still continuing Arab Spring.

The
signs of war are fresh as we enter the city, which lies some 170 kilometers
from Damascus. There is no one on the streets at high noon, and Baath
University, where some of the bitterest fighting took place, is deserted. The
streets are littered with trash, and block after block of apartment buildings
we pass show no signs of life. The asphalted roads are rough, imprinted with
the tracks of tanks deployed to subdue the resistance. We pass the burned-out
hulk of an armed personnel carrier.

At
a roundabout where a statue of the current president’s father, Hafez Assad,
casts a benign look at us a la Kim Il Sung, we encounter our first checkpoint.
Soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs examine our papers as our driver, a Syrian
named “Teddy” who speaks perfect English, explains in Arabic that we are trying
to reach the police station to follow up the case of a Filipino domestic worker
killed in an ambush during the fighting. We pass two more checkpoints manned by
suspicious security men carrying the ubiquitous AK-47s before we reach the
police station, the front of which sports a makeshift barricade of tires, wood,
and stones. The thought flashes through my mind: This barrier will not stop a
determined bomber.

Investigating a Death

We
are met by the chief investigator, a man named Tobias, and we tell him that we
really need to know more about the death a 23-year-old Filipina who was shot
through the chest and killed in an ambush while traveling at 11 o’clock at
night with her employer and his eight-year old son at the main highway on
February 24, during the last phase of the siege of the city. We also want to
locate her employer and collect her back wages to send to her family in the
Philippines.

Tobias
tells us that he helped bring the woman to the hospital, but all he had was the
cell phone number of the employer, and this was no longer functioning. There
was no number for a landline and no address for the employer, and he tells us
that, for all he knew, the man and his family might have already left the city.
Tobias tries to project concern and friendliness, but he is obviously eager to
get rid of us.

Before
we leave, however, I ask if he knew if there might be more Filipino domestic
workers who might have been hurt or died during the siege. Having myself heard
stories from Filipinas who had been trapped close to the fighting in Homs and
then fleeing for the safety of the embassy in Damascus, I think it is very
possible that there were more domestic workers who were killed or hurt in the
fighting. But Tobias tells us he hasn’t heard of any.Aside from him, we have no other contact in
Homs for now, underlining the difficulties of finding out the fate of neutrals
caught in a war zone when one does not get cooperation from the host
government.

“This
is very poor police work, for a guy who says he took personal charge of the
girl’s case,” comments Teddy on Tobias’ work on the circumstances of the death
of the Filipina whose employers were are tracing as we drive away from the
police station.

A People under Occupation

As
we make our way out of the city, we see several clusters of people, but these
soon disappear and we pass by rows and rows of deserted apartment buildings. We
see a child running here and there, and a few adolescents walking hurriedly, but
that’s it. When we come to a checkpoint we passed earlier, we are stopped
again, and this time, the soldiers are more suspicious and ask more questions.
They want to see the papers of my Syrian companions and scan them for a long
time, though for some reason they do not ask for my passport.

This
is a city under occupation, I now realize fully. The soldiers regard the people
as the enemy, and the people reciprocate. I do not see any prospect of
reconciliation between the two sides. I half-jokingly request Teddy to bring us
to Bab Amr, the lower-class district that bore the brunt of the government
siege in February. He says that armed elements of the resistance are likely
there, and they might mistake our car for one belonging to a government
security agency. “You don’t want to become hostages of the terrorists,” says
Teddy.“As diplomats you would be worth
millions to them.”

When
we finally get back to the highway after a good hour and a half in this
shattered city, we all breathe a sigh of relief. One of us jokes that, with
little knowledge about Southeast Asia, the government soldiers probably thought
I was Chinese and thus friendly to the Assad regime. Does that mean we say I am
an Asian-American if we are stopped by rebel forces, I ask, and we all laugh.
With Assad now isolated, with his allies for all practical purposes down to
China, Russia, Iran, and Lebanon, most diplomats and foreign visitors are
increasingly treated with suspicion.

An
hour and a half later, we are in Tartus, off the shimmering Mediterranean Sea.
People are in the streets, and even in the early afternoon, families are taking
leisurely walks in the cornice that is Tartus’ most attractive feature. This
place has been largely exempt from the unrest since the majority of people here
are Allawites, the president’s people. The civil war has brought an end to the
tourist economy, but there is a sense of physical security that one does not
find, even in Damascus. I have a feeling it won’t last very long.

Tartus
and Homs. Two different worlds. Two faces of the same country.

Protracted Civil War?

Back
in Damascus the next day, I read that there has been heavy fighting between
government troops and rebel forces in the eastern city of Deir Ezzour.Along with the attacks in Damascus, the fighting
in Deir Ezzour appears to reflect the rebels’ new strategy of attacking
government forces at various points instead of taking them on in a big battle,
as they did in Homs where they were no match for the heavy firepower of the
Syrian Army. The so-called Free Syrian Army may be at a great disadvantage in
terms of weaponry for now, but arms coming in from Saudi Arabia and some of the
other Gulf states, which are ruled by Sunni elites that share the same
sectarian religious affiliation as the majority of Syrians, will undoubtedly
level the playing field.

Talks
with diplomats, aid workers, and journalists in the few days I am in Syria
produce varying assessments of the staying power of the Assad regime. Some say
it can hold out indefinitely, some count its tenure in terms of months, and
others say the collapse may come earlier than expected owing to an economy
crippled by international sanctions. But there is consensus on one thing:for the Syrian people, things will get worse
before they get better.

I
leave Syria, four days after I arrived, with 11 domestic workers in tow. They
are happy to be out of harm’s way. But they also worry about the fate of the
compatriots and friends they leave behind in a country that is descending into
civil war.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy In Focus on
26/03/2012
-Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Walden Bello is chairman of the Committee on
Overseas Workers’ Affairs in the Philippine House of Representatives, where he
represents the party Akbayan. He is also an adjunct professor at the State
University of New York at Binghamton and St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Canada

About Me

I graduated from the French University in Beirut (St Joseph) specialising in Political and Economic Sciences. I started my working life in 1973 as a reporter and journalist for the pan-Arab magazine “Al-Hawadess” in Lebanon later becoming its Washington, D.C. correspondent. I subsequently moved to London in 1979 joining “Al-Majallah” magazine as its Deputy Managing Editor. In 1984 joined “Assayad” magazine in London initially as its Managing Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief. Following this, in 1990 I joined “Al-Wasat” magazine (part of the Dar-Al-Hayat Group) in London as a Managing Editor. In 2011 I became the Editor-In-Chief of Miraat el-Khaleej (Gulf Mirror). In July 2012 I became the Chairman of The Board of Asswak Al-Arab Publishing Ltd in UK and the Editor In Chief of its first Publication "Asswak Al-Arab" Magazine (Arab Markets Magazine) (www.asswak-alarab.com).

I have already authored five books. The first “The Tears of the Horizon” is a love story. The second “The Winter of Discontent in The Gulf” (1991) focuses on the first Gulf war sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His third book is entitled “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Balfour Promise to Bush Declaration: The Complications and the Road to a Lasting Peace” (March 2008). The fourth book is titled “How Iran Plans to Fight America and Dominate the Middle East” (October 2008) And the fifth and the most recent is titled "JIHAD'S NEW HEARTLANDS: Why The West Has Failed To Contain Islamic Fundamentalism" (May 2011).

Furthermore, I wrote the memoirs of national security advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, Mr Robert McFarlane, serializing them in “Al-Wasat” magazine over 14 episodes in 1992.

Over the years, I have interviewed and met several world leaders such as American President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, Late King Hassan II of Morocco, Late King Hussein of Jordan,Tunisian President Zein El-Abedine Bin Ali, Lybian Leader Moammar Al-Quadhafi,President Amine Gemayel of Lebanon,late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Haitian President Jean Claude Duvalier, Late United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,Algerian President Shazli Bin Jdid, Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Siyagha and more...